I would like to offer you two personal stories of racism, as honest and truthful as memory and prudence allows, followed by a personal reflection about how I grapple with what can only be labeled my own racist tendencies. Ibram X. Kendi’s vulnerable, honest and clear-headed thinking about racism in How to be an antiracist, including his own racist tendencies, offers an invitation. I am not alone. Nor, perhaps, are you.

STORY #1

It is early Sunday morning January 2002 and I am standing in the middle of a large group of people in London outside Harrods Department store, waiting for it to open. With the September 11, 2001 Al Qaeda attack against America fresh in my mind, I am thinking a bomb outside Harrods would be a perfect opportunity for a terrorist organization. I glance around the crowd and my eyes search and lock on a light-brown-skinned-bearded-young-man. Almost instantaneously, a thought-stream competes with this eye movement.

Here I am in London with a group of Luther College students studying conflict and reconciliation in Northern Ireland. We have just spent two weeks in Northern Ireland reading about and discussing the Irish Republican Army, the Ulster Volunteer Force and other terrorist groups. Among many things, we learned the Provisional Irish Republican Army had set off bombs outside Harrods in 1973, 1974 and in 1983, with the 1983 attacking killing six people and injuring 90.

After this episode, I recall immediately reflecting upon my paired reactions. My first reaction, without conscious thought, pointed me to a Mohammad and not to a Michael. My second reaction, itself an interrogation and with conscious thought, countered my first with reasoning that rejected picking a Mohammad instead of a Michael. And upon further reflection, I rejected the selection of either Mohammad or Michael solely on the basis of their religious identity because I knew most Muslims and Catholics rejected the terrorist tactics used by Al Qaeda and IRA.

STORY # 2

It is two days ago, a Saturday afternoon in Houston and Rebecca and I decide to take up her son Jonathan’s offer of his car for a blizzard run to the nearest Diary Queen. Our navigator maneuvers us through about 10 miles of Houston streets to a familiar DQ storefront. As we share the small snicker’s treat in the parking lot, we start to look around the neighborhood.

Lots of people walking around & busy street traffic make clear to us we are in the middle of a minority neighborhood in Houston. Two men in a dark SUV park next to us, exit and walk toward a run down looking barbecue place. I can feel my anxiety rising just a bit. Rebecca suggests I not get out of the car to put our trash in the receptacle. Almost in defiance to our paired anxieties, I exit the car to do just that. We then back carefully and slowly out of our parking spot, ease onto Old Spanish Trail Street, and are soon feeling more at ease in one of Houston’s upscale neighborhoods.

Like the earlier episode outside Harrods in London, this episode prompted reflection, another interrogation, of our own and each other’s feelings and thoughts. Once back at Jonathan and Suzanne’s, we recapped our adventure including the location of the Dairy Queen, on a street bordering Houston’s 3rd ward. “3rd ward,” Jonathan exclaimed, “that’s George Floyd’s neighborhood.”

Rebecca and I looked at each other, not knowing quite what to say. We had both been sickened by what had happened to George Floyd and fully supported the protests and the need for police reforms. Now there was a person, a person likely killed because of his race, to put with our experience, and to add to the interrogation of our responses to that experience.

Reflection

Two episodes, a couple of decades apart, with a common element. An almost instinctual feeling there is something wrong with this group or that group. I don’t know any other way to describe it. Where does it come from? Nature, nurture, or some combination. It seems part of the human machinery. What group or groups humans designate as ‘wrong’ varies by society and culture. So it isn’t only my problem, but it is ALSO MY problem.

Kendi defines a racist idea as “any concept that regards one racial group as inferior or superior to another racial group in any way.” He continues that to be antiracist is

“To think nothing is behaviorally wrong or right — inferior or superior — with any of the racial groups. Whenever the antiracist sees individuals behaving positively or negatively, the antiracist sees exactly that: individuals behaving positively or negatively, not representatives of whole races. To be antiracist is to deracialize behavior, to remove the tattooed stereotype from every racialized body. Behavior is something humans do, not races do.”

How do you and I become an antiracist? I don’t think that is the correct question. Rather it is how do we manage our built-in racist instincts? James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time offers what is really the only first step, for you and me, and for America, that will help us manage this individual and societal scourge.

Not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed unless it is faced.

I manage my built-in inclinations to see something wrong in the persons of some groups by interrogating my reactions, with as much awareness and honesty I can muster. This is only done through an act of will. I need others as well, to call me out. This ‘calling out’ at the societal level is currently being done by the millions of protesters throughout America.

I cannot change what I do not face nor can America change what it will not face. Let the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich’s reaction to the George Floyd killing and the outpouring of emotion across the country and the world, be the last word, for now.

Its deeper than you thought and that’s what really made me start to think. You’re a privileged son of a bitch and you still don’t get it as much as you think you do. You gotta work harder. You gotta be more aware. You gotta be pushed and embarrassed. You’ve gotta call it out.